Biography

DEBORAH SALEM SMITH is Trinity Repertory Company’s playwright-in-residence. Her plays include The Getaway Driver and Someone Will Remember Us (both co-written with Charlie Thurston), Anna K., Faithful Cheaters, Love Alone, Some Things Are Private, and Boots on the Ground (co-created with Laura Kepley). She was also a Huntington Theatre Playwriting Fellow. She has received multiple commissions, and has had writing developed at Fiasco Theater, Trinity Rep, Playmakers Repertory Company, and the Huntington Theatre Company. Her work has been published by Dramatists Play Service.

Smith grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and graduated cum laude from Princeton University where she won the Francis LeMoyne Page Visual Arts Award and the Ward Poetry Prize. She went on to get her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Michigan where her writing was recognized with a Major Hopwood Award, a Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship in Poetry, and a Colby Fellowship in Creative Writing. She also had poems published in the Berkeley Poetry Review.

She received an Emerging American Artist Fulbright for playwriting at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theater. Other awards include an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, a National Jane Chambers Playwriting Award Honorable Mention, and a Portland Stage Clauder Competition Award. She was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Drama and for the IRNE Award for Best New Play. Her work has been honored with an Andrew Mellon National Fellowship in the Humanities, a Bray Visiting Scholar/Creative Artist Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Residency.

She teaches playwriting at Brown University. On windy days, if she opens her window, she can hear the ocean.